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Every thread about it just turns into a debate by either extremists or participants that think they're above it all and arguing about what the movement even is rather than moving it forward. I've tuned it all out and really couldn't care less.
 
king3pj said:
I'm so sick of this stuff. In my opinion, the extremists on both sides of this craziness are nut jobs. Obviously, anyone making death/rape threats because they disagree with someone's opinion about video games is wrong. That's so ridiculous that I can't imagine even their own group supporting it. Yes, games journalists are sometimes friends with the game developers they are covering. Is that really the end of the world? If you think a particular reviewer's scores are affected by their relationships find one you like better. Between all the websites and youtubers there are a million reviewers out there.

I can't say I agree with the other side either. I've been following the Brianna Wu stuff pretty closely over the last week or two. The reason I've been following her end of it is because her podcast, isometric, is one of the many podcasts I listen to at work. She was the latest victim of these threats and was featured near the end of that New York Times article. From her twitter I know that in the last few days she has been interviewed by CNN, BBC, CBS, MSNBC, Huff Post Live, and others.

I liked the podcast but her rants in the last couple weeks have really turned me off. In the latest episode one of the other female hosts, Georgia, who is pretty new to gaming was talking about how much she loved Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Brianna jumped in and said how sexist and lazy the developers were because the main characters wife dies at the beginning. She said he should have died and it should have been her going for revenge. She said for that reason that she was boycotting it and other games without a female main character. Brianna hadn't played the game for herself but felt comfortable calling it misogynistic. Georgia, said the whole family was murdered including the main character and his son and that she didn't think it felt misogynistic. A wraith who also had his family murdered brought him back to fight. Brianna immediately shot her down. She said that because Georgia wasn't on the front lines of all this gamer gate crap that she didn't understand it. Basically she was told her opinion was wrong by someone who hasn't seen the game for herself because it didn't line up with the point she wanted to make.

On the podcast, Brianna is calling out every game that doesn't have only a female main character or an equal number of female main characters to pick from as misogynistic. She is anti-bullying yet she is trying to bully developers into making their characters female. I like playing games like Tomb Raider where the main character is female and I think it's great that Mass Effect gives you a choice. I think it's ridiculous to demand that all games do though. A developer should be allowed to tell any story they want in their games just like writers of Books, Movies, and TV. If someone wants to tell a story about a male character they should be able to without being labeled misogynistic.

In the end, I don't think either of these fringe cases represent the average gamer. Games are fun. Keep politics out of it. I just hate that every time games are featured in main stream media it's for something terrible like this. No wonder people look down on gamers.
Click to expand...
I don't think you can call what Brianna and other "feminists" are doing "bullying" because the majority are simply just complaining about female roles in games, even if their arguments are often hampered by the fact that they often haven't actually played the games they're complaining about. Complaining isn't bullying. Making death threats and doxxing and other horrible things that the opposition is doing is DEFINITELY bullying. I think that's a major crux of the problem. The people against, well (I honestly don't even know what it is the #GamerGate people are against at this point) diversity for the sake of diversity are going WAY overboard in their opposition. And because of all this, numerous developers, both female and male (Phil Fish comes to mind) have left the careers they love because of all the harassment and pressure they have received.

Having said all that, I do feel that the "feminists" (I put that term in quotes because I don't equate what these women are doing to the plight of true feminists that we saw fighting for voting rights and other social inequalities from back in the day) very often over blow things. As I said, while the "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" does bring up a few valid points, it seems to want this great world where there's ALWAYS an equal amount of females as males in games and they play the same roles and the women aren't there to just be oppressed. Because of course, such a situation exists in ALL FORMS of media EXCEPT for video games. And I recently lost a LOT of respect for Anita when she tweeted (in reference to Bayonetta 2), Everything about Bayonetta's design, mechanics and characterization is created specifically for the sexual pleasure of straight male gamers. First off, the game hasn't even been released yet, so she obviously hasn't played it. But at this point, if you don't "get" that the whole Bayonetta persona is done as a satire of sexism and that Bayonetta is actually a "pro female" character given by how strong she is as a protagonist, then you clearly are not an informed person on the subject matter and thus I'm not going to take your interpretations of your subject very seriously.

Unfortunately I see this #GamerGate thing getting worse before it gets better. I follow a number of game developers and writers on twitter and the amount of references I see to this whole mess is exhausting. And it's clearly getting to a lot of them as well, leading to some of them to question the field they are in, which is a shame. Hopefully I'm wrong and maybe by bringing this to the masses the dummies pushing this abuse will realize they've finally become what they and others spent YEARS trying to debunk (that gamers are socially inept retards looking for excuses to bring video game violence into the real world) and will right their ways.
 
I'm not trying to say that misogyny doesn't exist in the games industry. I'm also not trying to say that most games don't feature a male main character. They certainly do. The facts are that most people in the games industry are male and when they try to tell a story they can relate to it might involve a male character.

I'm all for more women getting into the industry. I'm all for men and women who are already in the industry making more female driven stories. I still say that what Brianna is doing is bullying though. On the show she calls individual games and their developers sexist or misogynistic simply because they chose to tell a story about a male character. This includes games like Shadow of Mordor that she didn't even play first before forming that opinion. She is shaming individual developers and games for not choosing to tell stories about females. The point of a creative job like that is to tell the story you want to tell.

On the most recent episode, she also called out The Last of Us. I get that the main character is a white man but Ellie and some of the other women characters are pretty badass in their own right. There are plenty of games she could call out that actually objectify women like Dead or Alive. I don't think it's right for her to call the creators of games like Shadow of Mordor and The Last of Us misogynists just because they didn't make the main character female.

I just think she's throwing around that word way to easily. According to her almost every man in the gaming industry is a misogynist. She loses some credibility with me when she calls Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley misogynists for what they did with TLoU.
 
And then if they DID make the main character in SOM female, they'd say, "Well, it's just a man with a female skin!"

I don't want to delve TOO much into this because then we're going to delve into "Pit" territory, but part of this is part of our INCREDIBLY PC culture where terms like misogynist, feminist, and racist have been COMPLETELY watered down to where the term is thrown out there for the littlest thing, and the rise of easy communication like Tumblr, Twitter, and Podcasts makes information much easier to be disseminated and much easier for the vocal minorities to overshadow the silent majority. I think the short answer is that yes, something SHOULD be done to encourage diversity in gaming, but quite frankly the most vocal of this drive are not going about doing this the right way.

On a brighter topic, here's a new trailer for the new Saints Row game, "Gat Out of Hell"

 
yourbeliefs said:
quite frankly the most vocal of this drive are not going about doing this the right way.
Click to expand...

Great point! When you attack something (e.g., sexism in gaming), people have a funny way of attacking back (not that violence or threats of violence are ever justifiable).

State clearly what you want in games and don't support the games you don't want. Every gamer is guilty of the latter. We all, men and women alike, play (and enjoy) games that feature sexist tropes if not misogynist undertones. Just like we both enjoy those kinds of movies. If 48% of gamers are now women, that's a substantial enough customer base to design games for (as of course is currently underway with many mobile and social media game developers).

The tide is shifting. We have a new Lara Croft, just like we now have interracial couples and gay characters as positive role models on every network TV show. But change is slow. People are afraid. And when they are afraid and don't understand, they just react from their conditioning. "Know thy enemy" and approach them accordingly (with caution).
.
 
yourbeliefs said:
Looks like Advanced Warfare preload is having some issues...

http://www.polygon.com/2014/11/3/7151227/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-ps4-preload-problems-sony
Click to expand...

This wasn't the case for me and the 4 guys I was playing with on PS4 last night. We all preloaded and tried to enter the game about 5 minutes before midnight last night. This just made the countdown clock go full screen. When the countdown hit zero the game automatically launched and we were all in without issue.

We were actually joking about how we were wasting our time because we thought there would be launch problems. I was pleasantly surprised to see everything working correctly and no lag.
 
I think it's that issue along with the fact that Rogue was not released at all to critics and to basically no fanfare. So potentially Ubisoft has released one very public dud as well as one hidden dud. I bet Ubisoft is praying that Far Cry 4 does better. That's basically their last chance of redemption for the year.

It seems like Ubisoft messes up when it comes to AAA releases, but the smaller ones do quite well. I recently finished Valiant Hearts (which I'll review later) and thoroughly enjoyed it, and I've heard good things about Child of Light, and I've been a champion of the recent Rayman games for a while.

On that topic, here's a 6 minute compilation of glitches

 
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